If you use an electronic medical record system – or electronic health record (EHR) system, as they're coming to be called – you know a lot you wish you had known before you started using it. Whether your EHR is making your life a living hell or revolutionizing your practice, you have knowledge that's denied to those without EHR experience.

Whatever you've learned, you can bet that hundreds of your colleagues would love to know what you know. These are the family physicians currently thinking about getting an EHR system. Are they likely to make the same mistakes you made? Could they benefit from what you've learned about EHRs in general and about your system in particular? You bet they could.

You now have an opportunity to help your colleagues benefit from your experience: The FPM survey of EHR user satisfaction is still open for your input. The survey gives you a chance to tell the whole specialty what you think of the EHR system you use. The results, when published in FPM, will offer untold numbers of family physicians the kind of help you wish you had had when you were making the leap into electronic records.

Completing the survey is easy; visit
http://www.aafp.org/ehrsurvey.xml to fill out the survey online or download a printable version you can fax back to us at 913-906-6010. Alternatively, you can get the printable version e-mailed to you: Just send a message with the subject line EHR survey form to
fpmedit@aafp.org; a PDF copy of the survey will be sent by automatic reply.

Your colleagues need all the help they can get

As you can tell, we're not surveying a randomly selected sample of family physicians. We don't aspire to “paint a picture of EHR use in the early 21st century” or anything so elevated as that. While that kind of information is interesting, it isn't that useful to family physicians in the trenches.

We have a more practical end in mind. This is a down-and-dirty survey intended to find out how satisfied individual users are with individual EHR systems. To be able to report product-specific results on a given system, though, we need to get responses from as many users of that system as we can. We need you. We need your partners. We need every family physician you know who has an EHR. The only hitch is that, for security reasons, we can accept responses only from AAFP members.

We need your response soon. Data collection will close June 30 so we can proceed to prepare the results for prompt publication. Please respond – and ask your colleagues to respond as well.

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Online access to most content in new issues of Family Practice Management is restricted to AAFP members and paid subscribers. All content of each issue is made freely available about one year after publication. For access to all FPM content, you may subscribe to the journal, purchase online access, or investigate joining the AAFP.